I was just wondering if the competition will be running again next year?

I started an entry for this year when I saw the news item on GameDev.net but I am doing a single person dev of the game and trying to do all the coding, modelling, artwork, sound, etc in the few months since the contest was announced is just impossible when I think about the time I have to devote to Real Life (tm) (work and writing my Masters thesis).

I'm going to continue work on my game and hope that the contest is running next year so I can submit it then...

He or she or it who ports the LWJGL to OSX to the same standard as the Windows and Linux ports gets a brand new spankin' bestest that-there-is Mac. With the teeny proviso that they get it to 1.0 along with us on the other two ports.

The community itself could host it's own constest with thier own rules. That could be rather fun.

Sometime after JGF moves to it's own server + CMS platform I'll run a community contest. Actually, I'd like to do frequent mini-contests too, without prizes - just glory to the winners! - a bit like the Sun one, i.e. you don't have to write the game during the contest, you can submit something you already did.

(PS if anyone has a good relationship with their hosting company and that company does JVM's on their servers, and you think they might consider donating a server for JGF to run on please let me know. Sorting out the server is the only thing currently standing in the way of getting a domain and moving JGF to it's own private CMS...)

Dedicated servers with root access (so you can upgrade the JVM and delete apache and other crud) and many gigabytes of bandwidth (JGF already is using multiple Gb per month with relatively little traffic - and it's not even serving any games at the moment!) from hosting companies that don't:

- accidentally delete your server - accidentally remove you from their DNS - get on the spam blacklist

etc are not too easy to find. All the trustworthy ones that offer 10Gb-15Gb/month transfer (about the minimum we could tolerate) at a reasonable price don't seem to allow JVM's / shell access.

I also don't want to have it burst to 30Gb one month and get a crippling surcharge .

I like the idea of mini contests. Something to spur the community. I definitely agree that the most important aspect of such a competition would be the dialog. And you are right in that is something that probably could have been better organized by Sun in the first place.

The critical question is whether there would be enough entrants to flesh out more than just the first 2 or 3 mini-contests! The J2ME-ers are still out in the cold as far as java gaming goes (why? Is it because even places like JGO are still dominated by Americans? We've had thousands of great java mobile games to choose from for years over here in Europe...), leaving a very small number of java-games studios and a lot of hobbyists - most of whom only have/reserve the time to do a new game infrequently.

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I definitely agree that the most important aspect of such a competition would be the dialog. And you are right in that is something that probably could have been better organized by Sun in the first place.

I've run bigger competitions than Sun's before - measured either by prize money or number of entrants - and would certainly expect to get the organization and communications aspects spot-on! Might need some help with the promotion side, though...

they do a few price levels, the more the setup fee, the less the monthly cost. 49 a month for over a terabyte of data is still rather nice

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...plus $20 a month for basics normally included free like Plesk (which I can happily do without, assuming you get full root shell access?).

Didn't bother getting that, the silver support (or what ever it's called) is free and means they do the security updates for you. This comes as fun when they update certain things and iptables stops working. When it comes to the firewall being down I don't leave it that way long, and as I don't have the time to investigate it, the only thing to do is a reboot, but everything comes right back fine it seems. I did have to go through and delete some crap when we first got our box, like rpc was still enabled, but after that I have to say I am impressed with the service, I put in a support call to get them to change the schedule for updates (so it's done when the UK is in bed, rather than when the yanks are) and it was all delt with quickly. They give you complete root access, you are the one with the root password. If you go for the silver support package you have to give them the root password too. My pseudo random sequence of lower case, upper case, numbers and symbols seems to be happily used by them, I have no idea what it is these days and don't care, I set up sudoers so I never log in as root anyway.

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But your point stands that it's a shedload of b/w for almost nothing. I'm impressed

me too

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Re: your experiences with this server, what are the servers like? Any weird stuff installed that's a pain to get rid of? (or do you just use the standard LAMP and so not care?)

the servers seem shiney and responsive, the latency from the UK isn't great, but then it's a box in the US, so it's to be expected. I've managed to download from it at 60 KB (ie, filled me ADSL pipe), and I managed to d/l to it from another site in the US at 200kB. It's a standard deadrat install, so there is some crap to be removed, but it's not hard to stop it comming up on bootup, or to shut it down. The disk space is 80gig on ours, so i've not bothered uninstalling it, I just up the shields on the firewall, and stop any service I don't want to run, so in theory, even if the firewall is down, the only ports that can be got to, are the ones that can be got at anyway.

I certainly have no complaints yet, apart from the iptables one, but i'm not too unsurprised as I seem to get problems with iptables at random times on my own machines running gentoo. (install new kernel, iptables needs a rebuild etc).

Thanks, endolf, that's great. Now I just need to find someone who's using their Debian install... (I've used most versions of RH, and Debian is like Mandrake in that it does undocumented fatal / catastrophic weird stuff (i.e. they break other people's software) because the devs are too lazy to tell anyone what they've done - but it's STILL better organized than RH )

I don't see anything on that page indicating a contest for next year, though it is good that the final results are posted somewhere. I thought sun would be showing off the winners or something to that extent, publicity for the winners and all, so far I haven't seen a link to any of the sites for the games that won (other than the links that were available from the forums).

Those zodiac PDA things look pretty cool, I've been secretly considering learning how to build gameboy advance games, if those PDA toys can run java that should pretty well kill any urges to build gameboy games I might get in the near future.

Those zodiac PDA things look pretty cool, I've been secretly considering learning how to build gameboy advance games, if those PDA toys can run java that should pretty well kill any urges to build gameboy games I might get in the near future.

Dust off your c/c++ compiler and fight pointers for a while, that will cure you too.

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